Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and the Journey of a Generation

by Sheila Weller

Ebury Press £18.99, pp582

Imagine a book entitled Boys Like Us, a study of the overlapping careers of three sensitive male singer-songwriters who came of age in the late Sixties, voiced the hopes and doubts of a generation and changed the course of popular music. Now imagine the three songwriters were Jackson Browne, Neil Young and, bear with me, Harry Nilsson.

Most informed readers would maybe fret about the first choice, wholeheartedly endorse the second and shake their heads in disbelief at the third. Sure, Harry had a colourful life, and got to hang out with some of the greats, but he is now remembered for a couple of minor hit songs, neither of which even his most devoted fans could claim helped changed the course of popular music.

In Sheila Weller's eminently readable, if somewhat gossipy Girls Like Us, a study of three of the supposedly 'most enduring and important women in popular music', Carly Simon is Nilsson. Best remembered for two hit songs - the throwaway 'You're So Vain', the mawkish 'Nobody Does it Better' - Simon does not possess the hit-making pedigree of Carole King or the musical ambition and songwriting skill of Joni Mitchell. What is she doing in this exalted company?

This is the biggest flaw in Weller's book and it makes you question her judgment. So this is not a critical book. It is more a homage to three of her heroines, who, she insists, once carried the hopes, dreams and aspirations of a female generation in their songs. Here, though, the songs take second place to the colourful lives: the celebrity romances, failed marriages, messy divorces and various infidelities, many of which fuelled the self-absorption that characterised the writing of all three.

Ironically, this is where Simon comes into her own. Raised in Manhattan, the daughter of highbrow, aristocratic parents - her father was co-founder of publisher Simon & Schuster - Simon's romantic history has been colourful. It includes an on-off affair with Mick Jagger and a serious teenage tryst with the celebrated English n'er-do-well Willie Donaldson, who chatted her up while selling her shoes in Bloomingdale's, one of his many unlikely day jobs. Weller records that the shoes were 'a pair of Charles Jourdain pumps'. It's that sort of book, heavy on gossipy detail, light on penetrating analysis.

Donaldson is memorably described as a 'charismatic, slightly perverted literary and theatrical figure ... with plump lips, very white skin, bad teeth and colourless eyebrows and lashes'. A typical Englishman, then, and a cad to boot. Having promised to marry Simon, he returned to England and took up with an old flame, the actress Sarah Miles. Meanwhile, Simon's short walk on the seedy side with Donaldson may have driven her into the arms of James Taylor, perhaps the least interesting junkie in pop history.

It is typical of the times, and the incestuous Los Angeles music scene, that Taylor had already enjoyed a dalliance with Mitchell, back when they were young and gauche outsiders. As the first wave of interesting, if self-absorbed, late-Sixties' singer-songwriters - Mitchell, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen - gave way to the second wave of even more maudlin, but infinitely less talented, navel gazers, Taylor teamed up with Carole King and, together, they soundtracked the long, slow slide into the mellow zone of early Seventies Californian snooze-rock.

King had found fame in the Fifities as a precocious hit songwriter in partnership with her first husband, Gerry Goffin. Her solo album Tapestry, released in 1971, defined the term soft-rock, becoming the biggest seller of its day and remained in the top 50 for six years. Taylor was only marginally less successful and his music even more narcissistic. He famously inspired the great gonzo rock critic Lester Bangs to write one of the most scathing critical putdowns in the history of music writing, 'James Taylor Marked For Death'. I doubt Weller has read it. She seems to have bought the insipid, self-obsessed mewlings of the early-Seventies' Me-Generation wholesale. Then again, so did millions of others.

It was left to Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, both tortured outsiders, to fracture the prevailing mediocrity with their darker albums from the mid-Seventies. (Revealingly, both are Canadian, and both contracted polio as children during the epidemic that swept though the country in the 1950s.) With Court and Spark and The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Mitchell almost singlehandedly made the term jazz-rock respectable, her intricate arrangements and incisive songwriting style making her for a time the musical equivalent of a Joan Didion story: perfectly pitched, incisive, acerbic.

That particular journey is for another book, though, and one that gives Mitchell her full due. Here, her artistic trajectory is subsumed into her personal journey. Much is made of her many love affairs, the daughter she gave up for adoption and the sadness and the subsequent that infused her greatest songs. There is also an extraordinary vignette in which she appears before her startled musicians in black face and pimp threads, supposedly channelling her black alter-ego, whom she called 'Art Nouveau'. It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

Girls Like Us, then, is a racy read that may tell you more than you need to know about the boyfriends, break-ups and breakdowns of its subjects. Along the way, you may find yourself longing for some detachment, some hard-nosed critical acumen. You may, like me, find yourself listening to Neil Young's 'Revolution Blues' for an alternative take on the Me Generation. 'I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars,' he howls, 'But I hate them worse than lepers and I'll kill them in their cars.' Over the top, perhaps, but there are more than a few passages in Girls Like Us, when you can see where he was coming from.